Killing Sarai

42

“Take off your clothes,” Victor demands.

My heart stops.

“What?”

“Sarai, take off your clothes.” He pulls me up from the chair by my hand. I try to wrench it away from him, but he applies more pressure.

“I’m not taking my clothes off! Why would you ask me to—?” I slap him with my free hand, right across the left side of his face.

He grabs my wrist. “I need you to trust me. I’ve brought you this far now do as I say and take off your fucking clothes.”

His uncharacteristic use of that vulgarity shocks me into compliance. My eyes dart back and forth between them again, my jaw tightening, my breath heavy and short expelling from my nostrils.

“Fine,” I say, jerking my hand from his. “But not in front of him.”

Victor takes me by the wrist and walks with me past Niklas and toward the entrance to his room.

“You have nothing I want to see,” I hear Niklas say just before Victor shuts the door.

I already feel naked standing in the wide open of Victor’s spacious ocean-view room and I haven’t even taken my clothes off yet. I want to linger as long as possible, drag it out so that maybe he’ll change his mind or at least tell me what this is all about, but he wastes no more time. And he doesn’t let me waste any more of it, either.

“Take them off. Now.”

I start with my shirt, pulling it over my head and exposing my bare breasts. I drop the shirt on the floor beside my feet. He watches me, not with lust in his eyes, but with determination. I lean over and slip out of my pants and all that is left are my panties.

He steps right up to me.

I hesitate. The space between us is about two feet but it feels like two inches. I don’t want to take off my panties, not because I’m afraid of him, but because…I’m embarrassed for him to see me that way.

When he steps up closer and doesn’t demand I take the panties off, I breathe a silent sigh of relief.

“Lay down on the bed,” he says and that breath is sucked right back into my lungs again before it can expel completely.

When I don’t act fast enough, he wraps his hands around my upper-arms and gently pushes me down against his expensive designer comforter.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

As I start to raise my arms to my breasts to cover them, I feel Victor’s warm hands on me. I freeze, my eyes wide and unblinking. He raises my arms above my head and begins to feel every inch of my skin, pressing his fingers along the underside of my arms first and then down toward my ribs before making his way to my breasts.

His eyes catch mine briefly.

Maybe he wanted to ease my fear of him with that glance, but all it did was make me want him to touch me more.

The guilt of that thought sears through me. But the touch of his hands on my br**sts, kneading only a small portion of them with his fingers, does something entirely different.

I picture his mouth on my nipple.

I force that ridiculous thought away and I watch him, his intent eyes and how deftly, yet at the same time, aggressively, his hands move across every inch of my body. Furtively I inhale the scent of his skin, his natural scent that somehow makes me want him to kiss me. He leans up and away from me, but he isn’t done. He goes for my thighs next, starting with the left and kneading his fingers around the flesh using both hands. And then the other thigh.